I am working on a small product based company developing .Net applications. There is a small team with 5-6 developers. I am a person responsible for planning everything. But my primary role is Software developer.
Now our current project is very unstable because of poor organization. Today my boss called me and told to submit a report about required resources, appropriate methodology, required man power and their salary scales to make the current project success.
I know I don’t have enough organization skills and I need to go deep in my programming skills. So I need to focus only in the development. So I can’t manage the project anymore.
Now I am searching some other ways to make ongoing development success. My questions are
- What is the suitable agile methodology to my team?
- Is Scrum is suitable for above mentioned scenario?
- If we adopt Scrum, what we have to do next? (I think hiring new one
to manage the project is more suitable. So we have to get Scrum
master and some other developers.) - Are there any resources (books, Blogs and etc) to get some tips and
advices to solve this problem? - If Scrum is not a suitable methodology for our scenario, what else
can be more suitable methodology to adopt?
Can anyone give a good solution for my problem?
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Yes, scrum may very well be appropriate, but you need to learn more about it. Ken Schwaber’s book will tell you a lot of stuff–like how the Scrum Master is not at all a project manager, and that the team needs to be self-organizing.
The main things you’ll need if you’re going down the agile route, is a team who can self-motivate and pick up whatever ball gets dropped in front of them, customers who are willing to work closely with the team throughout the development process, and a product owner who has the wherewithal to decide what needs to be within your current and longterm scope and its priority.
So, first you need to learn more about scrum and decide whether it is appropriate.
If you so decide, you’ll have to talk to all the stakeholders and see if they are willing to give it a go–hopefully one of them taking the reins as Product Owner. Then you’ll either need to hire or become a Scrum Master.
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You say your “current project is very unstable because of poor organization.” In response, your boss has asked the “person responsible for planning everything” whose primary job is a “Software developer” but “cannot manage the project any more” to do upfront planning. I am not criticizing your ability either as a software developer or a project manager but I suspect there may be bigger problems here that a development methodology cannot solve. Let me speculate on some of your issues and how Scrum may or may not help.
Scrum is great for handling imprecise or changing requirements. The team implements the requirements and produces a release that the product owner (customer) sees and suggests improvements in future sprints. It is especially good when the product owner does not know exactly what is wanted by “will know it when they see it.”
However, Scrum will not force the creation of such requirements. If you do not have access a customer representative to be a product owner, some of the advantages of Scrum will be lost.
Scrum is a great way to demonstrate progress. If people are losing faith that you can deliver something, providing a regular cadence of visible improvements can help greatly.
However, Scrum does not work as well when you have immovable deadlines with required features. Indeed, no development methodology does. Scrum will help you get a subset of your features implemented with good quality but it is not a silver bullet.
Scrum can also be difficult to explain to non-technical people used to dictating deadlines and seeing detailed upfront planning. Many people hear “plan as you go” as “cowboy coding” and baulk at the apparent loss of control. If you want to implement Scrum, it may be easier to pick a less critical project and demonstrate it working. Otherwise, if you implement it here and the project fails, it will be much harder to use it for future projects.
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